Community Bonding Period Post

Understanding what goes into AIA Response Functions

 

 

Reading:

Many of the references sent by my advisor’s for this project show interesting applications of temperature response functions that I've been scanning for details, and the science is great. One reference is the Initial Calibrations of AIA on SDO. This paper explains that the instruments on AIA do not give spectroscopic information, so there is no way to calibrate the data directly. They give the instrument-response function below, that I know I'll be utilizing:
        

"instrument-response function [R(λ,t)=Aeff(λ, t)G(λ)]"

Learning the Coding Environments:

During the community bonding period, I have taken advantage of a few resources to help me get used to the SunPy and ChiantiPy coding environments. One is the ChiantiPy tutorial. I was advised that the contribution functions are vital to this project, so I'll offer a summary of that here. This is just a small piece of what will go into the modules.

The goal is to analyse emission spectra. Chianti.core has the ability to analyse the emissivities of the three strongest lines around 200 Angstrom using a contribution function. After importing this module, I defined the temperature and density of iron 14 to use for testing and applied the contribution function.

>fe14 = ch.ion('fe_14', temperature=t, eDensity=1.e+9, em=1.e+27)

>fe14.gofnt(wvlRange=[210., 220.],top=3)

I really like how this is automatically stored in at dictionary, with keys = [‘gofnt’, ‘temperature’, ‘density’]. This will be quite beneficial later when I am running this on a number of lines

I also tested this for a different line of Iron to show the peaks in temperature (I chose 177.240) at a specific density :

> fe10 = ch.ion('fe_10', temperature=t, eDensity=1.e+9, em=1.e+27)
> fe10.gofnt(wvlRange=[170., 180.], top=3)

On a side note, I successfully made a new branch in github!

REVISION:  Thanks to the recommendations of my advisor Will Barnes, I double checked the versions of Chianti that were being loaded. As it turns out, the version I had downloaded from github was not the one being loaded. This was causing discontinuous spikes in the contribution functions that were not suppose to be there. The plots have been updated to have the right continuous shape after loading the correct ChiantiPy, and I switched to a temp of 174 to 177 for Iron 10.

 

 Goals:

For the first weeks of coding, here are my goals: 

• My first task is to implement a new response function module into sunpy/sunpy/instr. This will be on my version of sunpy in github.
• In this module, I am filling in the different classes and definitions that will need to be developed, and am implementing some documentation for each one. 
• As part of GSoC, I found out recently that I need to review a pull request in Sunpy each week as well. This will be good practice for me, and I'll try to incorporate this into the blog. 

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